Journey's End
by Atiaran
Summary: A Fallout: New Vegas fic. At the end of her life, the Courier returns to the Mojave - and to Arcade. Female Courier, named Samara; possible spoilers.


**Standard disclaimer: **None of the characters, places, etc. in this story are mine, but are instead the property of Bethesda Game Studios. No copyright infringement is intended by their use in this story.

**Author's note:** This is the last of the New Vegas stories I had planned out featuring Arcade and Samara. I don't want to say I'll *never* write about these two again, as "never" is a long time, but there are no plans to do more about these two any time soon.

Up next for me, originally I had planned a huge crossover between New Vegas and Fallout 3 featuring *Samantha* (my Lone Wanderer) along with a large cast of assorted Raiders, Legionaries, Brotherhood of Steel, and other Wasteland dwellers. That's still on the boards and I actually have quite a lot written on it; however right now my first project is a Skyrim fic that came to me over the past couple months. The Skyrim fic won't be anywhere near as long as the crossover and will probably be done and up first, but I can't say when that will be. Also, things have slowed down these days as I've started a new job that is taking up some time and mental effort. So no promises on when either of those will be done and up.

For everyone (anyone?) who's still following along and has made it this far, thanks for reading.

* * *

The rays of the late afternoon sun slanted across the hard-baked, cracked earth, striking shades of red and orange from the high mountains and tinting the mesquite bushes and pines with gold. The sky was fading from its intense blue to yellow and cream as the sun descended; soon it would sink behind the western mountains, casting the land into shadow. Silhouetted against the horizon, far in the distance, the needle-shape of the Lucky 38 casino loomed; soon the lights of New Vegas would come on, turning it into a shining jewel.

The man paused and looked back over his shoulder for a moment at the distant city; then continued on his way. He was a very old man, in his eighties or even nineties; he moved slowly, leaning on a stout staff, yet the eyes behind the rims of his glasses were as clear and sharp as the eyes of one sixty years younger. He wore the white coat that had once, many years ago, identified members of the Followers of the Apocalypse. Slung over his shoulder was a messenger bag containing herbs and other medicinal plants: the results of his day's foraging. Despite his age and frail condition, he carried no weapon; weapons had not been needed in this part of the Mojave for decades.

He reached his destination as the final rays of golden light shone out over the tips of the mountains: a one-story prewar house with a low sloping roof, its cement-block walls in good condition, painted a dull sand color that blended with the baked earth of the plains. It was set on a low hill backing up to the ridge of mountains that defined the boundaries of the Mojave, tucked in a fold of the earth that gave it a commanding view of the whole expanse of the desert but helped to camouflage it from casual observation. As the house came in sight, the man took a moment to rest, leaning on his staff - and then stopped. He raised one hand to shade his eyes, focusing scrutiny on the low, roofed-over porch.

A bulky figure was slumped there, dozing in one of the battered chairs under the overhang, leaning back against the wall with a rifle propped next to her.

_It's her,_ he thought, in that first, sharp moment of recognition. He was surprised to find that he was _not_ surprised, despite the thrill that ran through him; it seemed he had always known someday she would return.

"Samara," Arcade called. His voice sounded rusty, unused in his ears; it had been weeks since he had last spoken to anyone. "Hey. _Samara_."

[*]

She jerked awake with a start, her hand going immediately to her weapon. Then her face cleared as she saw him.

"Arcade." She straightened in her chair.

Arcade slowly made his way across the yard, then hobbled up the low steps of the porch, leaning heavily on his staff. When he reached the top of the short flight, he stopped to rest, his knees aching.

The two of them studied each other for a long moment, simply taking in the changes the years had wrought. Again, Arcade was surprised to at how _right_ it felt: that she should be here now, like this.

Samara, he saw, was still wearing the Powered Armor he had seen her in last, that final night so long ago when she had come to him at the Followers' outpost and told him she was leaving the Mojave. The armor had clearly seen hard use. It was much more battered than it had been, with huge nicks and gouges; half of the left pauldron had been shorn away and what remained was blackened as if by laser fire.

Samara's face was seamed with deep wrinkles and lines, her red-brown hair now white. An ugly scar ran down the side of her face across her left eye, which was milky white and clouded. Yet her other eye was still that distant pale blue he remembered so well. He would have recognized her anytime, anywhere. _It's her, _he thought. _It's really Samara_.

He knew what she was seeing as she studied him: his stooped, bent posture, the bright gold hair that had once been his secret pride turned silver by time, his arthritis-knobbed hands, the lines that marked his own face. Yet in her own face he saw the same recognition he felt toward her.

There were a thousand questions he could have asked her - in other circumstances _would_ have asked her - but somehow they all seemed unnecessary. He settled on: "Have you been waiting long?"

She shrugged. "Not long. Just about an hour." Her voice sounded as rusty, as creaky as his own. He started to ask how she'd found him, but Samara beat him to it: "I asked around New Vegas and they told me one of the old Followers doctors lived up here. I guessed it was you." Her single eye clouded. "That place has changed a _lot_ since the last time I was here. I hardly recognized it."

There was another moment of silence as they regarded each other; it seemed _some_ things, Arcade reflected dimly, hadn't changed. At last he broke it with:

"Why don't I fix us some dinner?"

"Sounds good." And then she smiled.

[*]

Arcade asked her if she would like to come inside and climb out of her armor; Samara demurred, a tinge of pink coming into her withered cheeks.

"I don't move so well anymore," she explained half-apologetically. "Too many injuries over the years. Stimpaks can only do so much - after a while, all that damage catches up with you. The armor helps me get around."

"I bet it does," Arcade replied, thinking he wouldn't have considered that use for Powered Armor.

Leaning on his staff, Arcade navigated the door and made his way inside. The small building had four rooms: a front room, a kitchen and two bedrooms. Arcade hobbled into the second bedroom, which he used as an office / lab, and swung his messenger bag down from his shoulder, grunting as his joints protested with the effort.

"Are you all right?" Samara called from the porch, and he heard her armor whine as if she were about to rise.

"I'm fine. Not as young as I used to be, that's all," he called to her. Wincing with the effort - he _wasn't _as young as he had used to be, and it had been a long day - he made the short trip into the kitchen. "I hope you like Brahmin," he called.

"Better than prewar food. I've been living out of two hundred year old cans for the past couple weeks. I was hoping to shoot a molerat - get something fresh - but I haven't seen any around here."

"No, the area's safe now. The NCR ran all the dangerous critters out of here decades ago. I think the last Deathclaw was shot in Quarry Junction about twenty-five years back. It's safe enough that you don't even need to carry weapons. I haven't taken my Plasma Defender out of its case in years, and the last time was just for practice."

The kitchen was lit with the last of the afternoon light; Arcade swung open the pre-war refrigerator and lit the stove, cursing a bit as his fingers protested at turning the knob. "Two Gourmand specials, coming right up."

[*]

The Brahmin steaks turned out perfectly. Samara provided canned pork and beans as a complement, and Arcade opened a bottle of pre-war wine. They ate out on the porch, in the slowly cooling dusk, watching as the sky darkened and the stars emerged as twinkling pinpoints.

Lights came on as it grew darker, spread out across the vista of the Mojave. Arcade explained the whole region was electrified now, and that getting power to the Mojave had been one of NCR's first priorities, one that only increased in importance as more and more settlers began filtering into the region. With the increased population, the city of New Vegas had expanded dramatically. It was only a matter of time before the whole area was settled up.

They finished with locally grown fresh pears, and then lingered over the wine, drifting back into each other's patterns, re-establishing common rhythms. Samara's voice was thinner, raspier - as thin and raspy as his own, in truth - but the awkward pauses, the silences, stops and starts that had always been so much a part of her were still there. It was strange, he mused, how quickly they readjusted to one another - it could have been a week, rather than fifty years, since they had last spoken.

Samara spoke of her travels, confirming that she had indeed made it out to the old capital. It was much worse than the Mojave, she reported, which made sense; Arcade had heard that the former capital had gotten the worst of it when the bombs had dropped. Life out there sounded like what Arcade had heard of the Mojave over a century ago: isolated settlements with a handful of survivors and no overarching organization.

They had a hero out there, Samara told him, called the Lone Wanderer; she had apparently been born in one of the Vaults, Vault 101. This Lone Wanderer - Samara had never learned her name, thought perhaps she hadn't even had one - had been working on pulling things together, but it had been going very slowly.

He listened, as the night darkened around them and faint breezes drifted in from the plains; he listened as Samara described the famous, fantastic sights she had seen: the White House, reduced to a smoldering crater in the ground; the Capitol building, with half of the great dome missing; the Presidential Mall, divided into a million fortified trenches; the Washington Monument, still standing but with its outer covering raddled and fallen away in great chunks. The Pentagon, Arcade learned, had become the headquarters of a rogue chapter of the Brotherhood of Steel, and a colony of freed slaves had established a base in the Lincoln Memorial. That thin, creaky, yet familiar voice went on and on, and Arcade listened raptly, bright images forming behind his eyes of the places she had gone, the things she had seen and heard and done.

Then Samara asked how things had been in the Mojave, and it was his turn to speak. Arcade told her about the decades that had come and gone since their final confrontation: the expansion of New Vegas, the influx of settlers, the overall growing prosperity of the state as its ties with the NCR grew. He filled her in on the big issues of the day: the NCR's talks with New Canaan up in Utah about extending the monorail line up there, and the way it had divided New Vegas into pro and con groups.

As he paused to catch his breath, thinking back over the decades, Samara asked him if it was true that one of the Mojave's senators - she stumbled over the unfamiliar word - was a candidate for NCR vice-president.

"Jade Harley. I used to treat her brother when she was a kid," he said, smiling a little. "Seems like she used to drop in almost every day and ask me to tell her about the battle for Hoover Dam - and about you. She loved hearing stories about you. You were probably her biggest hero."

He watched with fascination as that faint stain of red filled Samara's withered cheeks again; it amused him to see her even now blushing like a schoolgirl. Her single pale eye dropped.

"Didn't you know?" he asked. "You're still a hero to the NCR - more than a hero, you've become a _legend_. You and Boone both." He chuckled a bit. "You should see what they say about the two of you in some of the school textbooks. They've got a statue of you in New Vegas - Michaelangelo worked on it - "

"I saw it." Samara grimaced. "I went to New Vegas first - thought you might still be at the Old Mormon Fort. That damn thing was the first thing I saw, right by the old Freeside Gates." She shook her head in disgust. "It doesn't look at all like me, thank God."

Arcade nodded. "Michelangelo didn't have a picture of you to go by - said he wanted more of an idealized image anyway. But that's not all. They've done several radio shows about your life, and for years the Tops hosted a musical about how you saved Hoover Dam. There was even a movie about you on TV - oh, didn't you know?" he asked as she frowned in confusion. "The NCR's got a working television station now. Mostly it shows holotapes of old pre-war shows, but there's a few new movies. The one about you was the first one they made."

Samara hissed through her teeth. "Sounds like I did the right thing leaving when I did."

Arcade smiled a little. "Probably for the best."

There was silence for a moment, as the stars twinkled above them and the pool of light that was New Vegas shone in the darkness. Arcade could see the outlines of the mountains in the distance, and for a brief moment his memory reached back five decades to the Big Empty, how mountains had stood up against the stark darkness of the sky. At last Samara looked back up at him.

"How are the Followers doing?"

_Should have known the question was coming._ Arcade sighed heavily.

"Problems?"

"You might say that." Arcade shook his head. "I, ah, that is - " He cleared his throat. "I actually ended up leaving the Followers some time ago."

"Oh?" Her brows contracted in an expression he remembered well; it was so familiar that for a moment, the lines on her face looked like an optical illusion, and the face of the woman he had known shone through.

"Surprised?"

"Well - " She frowned. "I always thought they were the right place for you. They just seemed to fit you so well." She shifted awkwardly. "The Followers cared so much for people, and spent so much time and energy helping them, just like you. Even though you wouldn't come with me when I asked, it always ... made me feel better somehow," she fumbled, "thinking of you back here, working with the Followers, caring for the sick, feeding the hungry. As if - maybe there was some good in the world after all."

The flush in her cheeks deepened. She darted a glance at him. Arcade found himself deeply touched. _She really thinks that about me ... ?_ Aloud, he said, "Well ... thank you, Samara. I appreciate hearing that. But - " He paused. "In the end, it wasn't really like that."

"Oh." Her face fell. "I'm sorry."

"Don't be. It's not your fault." He felt himself smile ruefully. "I thought they were different at first, but - The more I saw of the Followers, the less convinced I was that they were doing any good. Do you remember the last conversation we had before you left the Mojave?"

Arcade could see by her expression that she did. He himself remembered it like it was yesterday; every word was engraved on his consciousness.

"You said it seemed like nothing the Followers were working on ever got solved."

"Yeah." Arcade nodded. "I think by then I was already starting to have second thoughts, although I wouldn't admit it. I stayed with the Followers for several years after you left, but - " He shrugged. "I didn't really feel committed to them anymore. I think the conversation we had sort of crystallized everything that was bothering me about them." He sighed again. "They certainly had good intentions, but somewhere along the way, I guess I realized, good intentions weren't enough. Not without resources to back them up. Cutting formal ties with the NCR - that was exactly the sort of short-sighted idealism that ended up crippling them in the end. It was completely characteristic of them though."

"It was?"

Arcade nodded. "Private donations just couldn't make up the difference - not and support the kind of work they wanted to do on the scale they wanted to do it. Eventually they just couldn't make ends meet. There was a huge schism about ten years after you left. One faction within the Followers said it was time to start charging the populations we served. Another said we couldn't do that, that it would be betraying everything we stood for. It was - pretty ugly."

Samara only nodded. Shadows from the porch overhang fell across her face. A few small insects buzzed around the porch's overhead light. Arcade was silent for a moment, remembering.

"Yeah," he said at last. "Nobody came out of that one looking good. By the end, it wasn't even about the issues - it was just pure factionalism. It was pretty sickening, and what made it worse was that the infighting started to spill back over and affect our work with the populations we served."

"It sounds bad," Samara murmured. Arcade nodded slowly.

"Yeah. That was the last straw for me, really. I guess it was then that I realized that the Followers just weren't what I thought they were. I ended up leaving over it. I wasn't the only one either. A lot of good people got fed up and quit. The Followers never really recovered from that. They're still around but they're really a shadow of their former selves." He paused again, thinking. "Honestly, even the Brotherhood was doing more for the people than we were, after the treaty with the NCR that is." He shrugged. "Maybe it was for the best. Maybe our moment in time had simply passed."

"Are you sorry you joined them?" Samara asked with that strange naivete he remembered so well.

Arcade pondered for a moment, contemplating a question he'd had decades to think about. "No," he said finally. "I joined with the best of intentions - I wanted to help people, and they offered a vehicle for doing that. And we really did manage to do some good there for a while. I guess if you were to ask me if I was sorry about anything - it was that I think I stayed with them too long. I just wanted them to be something they weren't, and when evidence to the contrary began piling up, I didn't want to see it."

Samara nodded again. Then she smiled - but a different smile from the slight, half-smiles Arcade remembered; this one was clear, clean and slightly sad. _Wistful,_ Arcade mused; that was the word; and if he had been asked decades ago if Samara could ever be _wistful,_ he would have rejected the notion as absurd.

"You should have come with me, Arcade," Samara sighed. "We could have seen such wonderful things together. All the time I was out there, I kept wondering what you would have said if you were there - what stories, what history you could have told me. About how it was in the old days."

"There were many times I wished I had," he admitted. "All throughout the years, I wondered where you were and what you were doing. It kept me going, somehow - thinking of you out there, having your adventures ... "

He trailed off. Above, the sky was deepening to cobalt. A light breeze stirred the leaves of the white horsenettle stalks near the door.

"How's everyone else doing?" Samara asked at last. "Any of the old gang still around?"

"Hm. Let's see." Arcade thought for a moment. "Cass - she passed away about ten, fifteen years ago if I recall correctly." He frowned. "It was drink. Honestly, I'm surprised she hung on as long as she did. She would go through periods where she'd clean up her act, but they would never last. It was really a tragedy. Veronica's still around. She ended up re-opening the old Vegas library as a sort of technical university. Some of the old Followers joined her after they left the order. Several of the brightest minds of the NCR have studied there, and she apparently worked out some deal with the Brotherhood where their scholars spend some time on staff teaching and doing research. She calls it the University of New Vegas." He pondered a bit more. "Raul kept on as a vaquero for a while, but eventually he joined up with Beatrix and they left the area. Last I saw of them, they were headed down south, back to Tucson. That area's really quieted down these days; NCR traders and prospectors are already starting to filter down that way. Lily went back to Jacobstown, and she's still up there, tending her bighorners. She ended up keeping her medication and doesn't remember her grandchildren anymore unfortunately."

Samara nodded, her face still and solemn in the light from the stars. The big question hung in the air, almost visible. Finally she came out with it.

"Boone?"

"Boone ... " Arcade drew a long breath. "Nobody really knows. After you left, he just faded away. I know there are legends of the Ghost Sniper, a mysterious figure who protects passersby and caravans along the Long 15. People said it was supposed to be him. But there've been no new sightings of the Ghost Sniper in years, not since the NCR settled the area. Probably if he's still alive he's back up in the hills somewhere, would be my guess."

"I see." Samara's face darkened. "I wondered about him," she confessed. "After I left. I guess I always hoped - he would someday find peace."

Arcade had wished that too, for the tormented sniper. "I think he remembered you to the end," he said. "The few people who saw him reported that he spoke of the Courier. You leaving the Mojave - I think it was like losing Carla all over again for him."

Samara sighed. "I never wanted that," she admitted. "We were a bad match, I think. It never really worked well between us except when we were killing Legion together, and I guess in the end, it just wasn't enough."

Arcade nodded. She was gazing off into the distance, as if looking back through the mists of time; he wanted to speak to her, but the aura of reserve that surrounded her forbade it. Instead, he waited, patiently, for her to come back to him. And at last, she did.

"And the rest?"

Arcade related how the Great Khans had moved north to Wyoming after the battle and had established a new Khanate up there. "Some of the former Followers joined them, after the schism. I think it was a mistake," Arcade mused. "Although better organized than most, the Khans were at bottom essentially jumped-up Fiends. What little I've heard from the former Followers who joined them hasn't been encouraging. They and the NCR have been making warlike moves around each other for several years now and a lot of people say they fully expect it to come to blows in about five to ten years. When they do - " He shrugged. "Well, the NCR has the Brotherhood and the Boomers on its side - oh yes," he said to Samara's surprised look. "They've been working to develop flight capability. There's even a light-aircraft landing strip at Camp McCarren now. Anyway, if or when it does come to blows between the NCR and the Great Khans - " He paused. "I wouldn't bet on the Khans."

Samara nodded. "Papa Khan was an impressive man," she said, her single eye clouded in memory, "but yeah-you're right. The Khans were basically Fiends."

Arcade went on to describe how the King had disbanded his gang and he himself had been elected the first mayor of New Vegas. "He served two terms before stepping down. I was impressed," he admitted frankly. "I had always had him pegged for a petty dictator. I thought he'd appoint himself mayor in perpetuity. For a while he was one of New Vegas's representatives, and he stood for Senator but Jade Harley beat him out. He's retired now," Arcade said, "but he still runs the school where we found him. The whole thing has become something of a minor religion among younger Vegasites, and I hear it's even making some inroads in the NCR Hub too."

Samara laughed, a whispery shadow of her old laugh - the laugh he'd only heard a handful of times before.. "Hell, I've seen stranger religions in my time - in the Capital Wasteland, there was even a sect of people that worshiped an undetonated atomic bomb."

She smiled in fond memory, looking back again, into the depths of her travels. Arcade felt a dim pang; she had gone away from him again. There was another silence as the two of them sipped at the pre-war wine, and the stars twinkled above. The sound of crickets came to their ears.

At length, Arcade asked, "What about you, Samara?"

She started, as if coming back to him once more. "What about me?" she asked, raising the brow over her undamaged eye.

"What have you been doing all these years? When you didn't come back," he added, "I always assumed you must have settled down out there - or died, maybe."

"Didn't you hear the legend around New Vegas?" Samara asked, smiling. "I'm too mean to kill." She exhaled, long and slow. Her eyes turned East, toward the dark line of mountains that made up the border of the Mojave. "There was a man out there," she said at last.

"Oh." Arcade sipped his wine, somewhat surprised at a faint twinge of not-quite-jealousy within him

"Back east. He kind of reminded me of you a bit - he was a doctor too. We were together for a couple years. Didn't work out though. Had a kid by him. Little girl." She shrugged.

"You did?" Arcade tried to imagine Samara as a mother, and was surprised to find he could actually do so. The image that came to his mind was the Alpha Female Deathclaw they had faced and fought in Quarry Junction, so long ago. The words _Where is she?_ rose to his lips, but something in Samara's single, remaining eye stopped him.

Samara nodded. "Yeah. Named her Veronica. The dad kept the kid when we split up - better that way. I stayed in the area long enough to make sure the little squirt was off and running ... when she didn't need me anymore, I left."

Arcade would have loved to press for more, but her expression was steely, and the words were spoken with a familiar flat finality - one that, even after all this time, Arcade remembered, indicated the subject was closed. He tried to picture the child in his mind; the image he came up with was that of a little girl with Samara's pale eyes - and, strangely, his own brilliant blonde hair. _What - ?_

It came to him that he would almost certainly never meet that little girl - and that by now that little girl was a woman grown. An odd pang struck at his heart: a strange hot sharpness. Samara's face had gone to that familiar granite that he remembered from so long ago, and he thought, _I'd lay odds there's a lot more to that story._

But he could see from her face that he would never learn it.

After a moment, she shifted, as if trying to heal the momentary chill. "What about you, Arcade? What have you been up to?"

He managed a lopsided smile. "Same as you, minus the kid. Couple men - nothing lasting though. And eventually - " He shrugged. "Well, I'm used to being on my own. It's easier. I've always been on my own; I guess I just got to like it that way."

"It's simpler," Samara agreed. "Don't have to argue about stupid things ... bend your life around someone else's." She lifted one shoulder. "I never was much good at that."

"Me neither," he said wryly. For a moment, they shared a glance, and then the slight coldness between them was gone. "Anyway, after I left the Followers, I went back to the NCR for a while. Opened a family practice near the Boneyard - where the Followers were headquartered, there's a big medical university there. I was there for ... " He paused, trying to remember. "Quite a few years," he said at last. "But somehow, I - I always felt drawn back to the Mojave. At last I closed my practice and came back out here. I still treat people occasionally, mostly poor folk from back in the hills. I run a few experiments: the sorts of things I was doing for the Followers when you met me." He paused. "It's quieter here. More peaceful. I guess in my old age I appreciate that more."

"Yeah." Samara snorted, a strangely youthful sound. "Though honestly I never thought I'd live this long. I'm still kind of surprised I did."

Arcade smiled wryly. "'Too mean to kill,'" he reminded her.

"Heh. Yeah." Samara laughed a bit.

For a moment, the two of them sat there, simply contemplating the past together. Then the talk started up again. They lingered on the porch, sipping the old pre-war ine, as the stars wheeled above them; talking of this and that, discussing the changes to the Mojave, the history between them, what they had done in the days of old.

Slowly the conversation between them began to lag, the pauses growing longer and longer as the night deepened.

At last Arcade yawned. "Time for me to turn in. I'm not as young as I used to be, you know." He pushed back from the table, drew a breath, bracing himself, and then heaved himself to his feet; his knees creaked in protest and he leaned on the porch post for a moment before he caught his balance. "The spare bedroom is overrun by lab equipment, but I can make you up a bed on the couch."

Samara had been nodding in the chair opposite him; now she opened her eyes with an effort - one clear, the other clouded. "In a bit," she murmured. "I want to sit out here a bit longer and look at the stars. Can't really see 'em back east; the cloud cover's too thick. Nice to see ... the Mojave night sky again. I missed the stars."

"All right. Well, I'll make you a bed anyway. Come in when you feel like it. Don't worry about waking me, I sleep pretty heavily these days."

Arcade turned to go inside when Samara spoke again. "Arcade ... "

He glanced back. "Yes?"

She looked over her shoulder, that one eye still as bright as it had been years or decades ago. A smile came to her lips - the small smile he had seen from her so rarely in the days of old. "We had a pretty good run, didn't we? We did some really amazing things."

Arcade felt an answering smile tug at his own lips. "Yeah," he said. "Yeah, we did."

She laughed then: a bright, youthful laugh, as clear and clean as a mountain brook. It startled him; he realized he could count on the fingers of one hand the moments he had heard her laugh, back in the days when everything had been new and all possibilities open.

Samara's pale eye drifted closed again, and her head sank on the chest of her Power Armor. Arcade stood there a moment longer, watching her: a black silhouette against the incredible vastness of the starry Mojave sky; an indistinct figure, as befitted a legend.

_And yet to me, she was always just Samara._ A wave of warmth came over him. _What would I have been without her? What would the Mojave have been?_ He could not imagine.

At last he turned, and went into the house. He closed the door behind him, leaving the black shape of Samara dozing on the porch, under the dazzling stars.

[*]

_He dreamed, that night, that he was back in the Lucky 38: the dim lighting, the banks of silent slot machines, the lush, dark hues, all was as it had been so long ago, in the days when everything was new and bright and the Mojave still in spin. He felt the weight on his shoulders and his hip and he knew he was wearing his Combat Armor with his Plasma Defender by his side. The pains in his back and knees were gone, and he did not need to look down to see that he was young and strong again, as he had been in his prime. _

_And there were the rest of them, looking just as they had been: Veronica and Cass, leaning against the banks of slot machines, laughing together, Cass with her hat pushed back from her head showing her fire-red hair, and Veronica in the stunning evening dress Samara had brought her from the Ultraluxe. Raul lit a cigarette and gave him a wave; next to him was Lily with her knitting wound under her arm. ED-E was bobbing between them, and back in the shadows Arcade could see the outlines of a figure he knew was Boone. The cold sniper watched, stonefaced behind his sunglasses, while around his neck, incongruously, hung the Distinguished Service Cross he had been awarded for his service at Hoover Dam. He gave Arcade a slight nod of acknowledgement, but that was all. _

_Arcade left the casino then, the heavy doors swinging open at his touch. He walked along the Strip, through the gate, and out to Freeside, and as he walked, he saw others he had known in those days. The Remnants were gathered under a streetlight: Daisy, Moreno, Cannibal Johnson, Doc Henry, all smiled and nodded to him as he passed; further on was the white-coated Julie Farkas talking to her friend, the NCR Major Elizabeth Kieran. Michaelangelo and his sister were there, looking more at ease on the open air of the street than they had ever been; Beatrix gave him a lascivious wink, standing next to Mick and Ralph; a bit further on, Benny and the cool cat Swank nodded, and beside them were the King and the rest of his crew, with Rex barking in their midst. _

_And there were others, so many others: Chief Hanlon, silent and magisterial; surrounding him were First Recon, their uniforms perfect, red berets adorned with the gold pin bearing the slogan: The last thing you never see. Boyd was there, with Silus standing next to her; neither looked hostile or tense, and both gave him a cool nod. Further on were Keely and Dr. Angela Williams, and Colonel Hsu with Major Dhatri just a little bit beyond them. Others: Mags and her squad, beaming proudly; Pearl and her Boomers, Raquel and Loyal and little Pete; Elder MacNamara surrounded by a squad of Brotherhood paladins; Papa Khan with his clan around him: Jack, Diane, Melissa, others. Trudy, Doc Mitchell and Sunny Smiles from Goodsprings, the old Nightkin Marcus from Jacobstown ... faces from his past, from memory, men and women and children fifty years and more gone; yet now restored to life and youth and strength. _

_He walked on through their silent nods and smiled greetings, through the streets of Freeside until he came to the outer gates that led to the Mojave, and there he saw her: Samara, young, unscarred, looking as vital and alive as she had so long ago, during the days when she had stood at the pivot point of the Mojave and turned Fortuna's wheel by hand. Her Power Armor shone, unmarked and resplendent, and as she turned to him, he saw the darkness and distance that had always hung around her were gone. The ice in her pale blue eyes had melted at last. Her gaze met his and her face lit in a brilliant smile, the likes of which he had never seen from her in life. _

_She reached out to him and said something; he could not hear her clearly, but he took her hand and the word he spoke in reply was: _Yes._ The outer gates of Freeside swung open before them, revealing a dazzling sunrise. Together they turned, and, side by side, walked on into the light._

_The End._


End file.
